The Houses of Hereford 1200-1700

By Nigel Baker, Pat Hughes and Richard K. Morriss

The cathedral city of Hereford is one of the best-kept historical secrets of the Welsh Marches. Although its Anglo-Saxon development is well known from a series of classic excavations in the 1960s and ’70s, what is less widely known is that the city boasts an astonishingly well-preserved medieval plan and contains some of the earliest houses still in everyday use anywhere in England. Three leading authorities on the buildings of the English Midlands have joined forces combining detailed archaeological surveys, primary historical research, and topographical analysis to examine 24 of the most important buildings, from the great hall of the Bishop’s Palace of c.1190, to the first surviving brick town-house of c.1690. Fully illustrated with photographs, historic maps, and explanatory diagrams, the case-studies include canonical and mercantile hall-houses of the Middle Ages, mansions, commercial premises, and simple suburban dwellings of the early modern period. Owners and builders are identified from documentary sources wherever possible, from the Bishop of Hereford and the medieval cathedral canons, through civic office-holding merchant dynasties, to minor tradesmen otherwise known only for their brushes with the law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Dec 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785708176

Nigel Baker

Nigel Baker is a freelance archaeologist specialising in historic towns and has previously published books on Worcester and Gloucester, and Shrewsbury. He worked for Herefordshire Council for eight years and is an Honorary Research Fellow of the School of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Birmingham.

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Preface

Ron Shoesmith and Nigel Baker

The City of Hereford Archaeology Committee was formed in 1974 as a result of a report detailing the archaeological implications of future development in the city (Shoesmith 1974). The Committee then organised an excavation and survey body: the City of Hereford Archaeological Unit (CHAU). For several years the unit concentrated on excavations, with major reports published in the 1980s (Shoesmith 1980, 1982, 1985). Interest in standing buildings, mainly ruins such as Goodrich Castle, led to the production of stone-by-stone elevation drawings used to analyse the buildings and to record details of their construction and subsequent development (Shoesmith 2014).

This led to further building surveys such as those of the ruined churches at Urishay and Llanwarne (Shoesmith 1987, 1981). The importance of producing detailed reports, particularly of listed buildings in advance of development, was properly appreciated by the early 1980s, and CHAU had the necessary expertise. One of the earliest of its building surveys was that of the Essex Arms, then a dilapidated building on the east side of Widemarsh Street. After a full survey had taken place, this timber-framed building was carefully taken down and re-erected as a café at Queenswood Country Park, some six miles north of Hereford. This was followed by a detailed survey of the rear buildings at 26 and 27 High Town, then the International Stores and Wakefield Knights. The main three-storey timber-framed building of no. 26 was shown to be reasonably complete above the ground floor and was an excellent example of a rich merchant’s house of the 16th century. The two buildings now form a branch of W.H. Smith. Many other surveys followed, including two of particular interest in 1987. These were the Cathedral Barn, which was shown to be of probable 13th-century origin (Shoesmith 2011), and the rear part of No. 41a Bridge Street, a timber-framed building of the early 15th century. 1987 also saw the influential High Town Survey by the architects Rock Townsend.

By the early 1990s, CHAU had accumulated a substantial portfolio of historic building surveys, mostly arising from planning and listed-building casework. Each had been individually published as what would later be termed ‘grey-literature’ – technical reports of limited circulation – but there was clearly scope for a single volume looking at these buildings as a body to discern and describe some of the most important strands in the development of housing in the pre-modern city.

To this end, work began by CHAU on a volume of case-studies and synthesis, supported by Hereford City Council and English Heritage. By July 1996 a draft collection of case-studies had been completed, most of the individual building analyses being done by Richard K. Morriss, together with historical research commissioned from Dr Pat Hughes. The volume, of considerable length and detail, was known by the working title of ‘The Secular Buildings of Hereford’ (1996) and typescript copies were deposited for reference with a number of City Council departments, the County Sites & Monuments Record and with English Heritage. The lengthy tasks of synthesis and editing for publication remained, however, and the project stalled – and then, three years later, was overtaken by local-government reorganisation as Hereford City Council disappeared and was replaced by the unitary Herefordshire Council.

In the opening years of this century, the ‘Secular Buildings’ typescript was put to good use by Herefordshire Council’s Conservation Officers but remained unpublished and little-known outside Hereford. In 2008 discussions were initiated with English Heritage (beginning with Tony Fleming, Inspector of Ancient Monuments; later Colum Giles, Head of Urban Research; latterly Rebecca Lane of Historic England), with a view to reviving, up-dating and publishing the volume. The principal authors of ‘Secular Buildings’ were re-recruited to the project, which commenced in 2010, supported by English Heritage, under the auspices of Herefordshire Council. Work began with fresh visits by the team to as many of the case-study buildings as possible; in the intervening period, one had been demolished, one had been moved out of the city, and another was currently a building site.

The revived, revised, volume, was to be, as expressed in the 2009 project design submitted to English Heritage, a ‘definitive account of the development of houses and housing in the city from the earliest surviving example up to and including the advent of brick towards the end of the 17th century’. The new volume would also, it was hoped, reach a wider audience than local archaeologists and vernacular architecture enthusiasts, not only in the sense of reaching an informed but non-specialist market but also in the sense of adding Hereford to the national corpus. It was clear to all that the historic buildings of Hereford are not just of significance to Hereford – they have a place in the bigger picture of the evolution of English towns, urban society, urban architecture and urban form: as a well-studied group, and on account of particular individual buildings, most notably the 12th-century great hall of the Bishop’s Palace.

The revision of the Secular Buildings volume also offered an opportunity to broaden the study to include the landscape context of the buildings – its effect on them, and theirs on it. This arose from work on Hereford for English Heritage’s (later Historic England’s) Urban Archaeological Strategy programme (1992 – present), in particular the Characterisation of the historic townscape of central Hereford (Baker 2010a). The revision also presented an opportunity to secure some more dendrochronological dates to add to those reported in the original ‘Secular Buildings’ text. English Heritage therefore commissioned a further three sets of samples, for 29 Castle Street, Harley Court, and the Old House, and new colour photography was shot in early 2016. The revision and editorial process survived severe cuts in archaeological provision in the county in 2013–14 and the book, in its present form, was re-submitted to English Heritage in March 2015 and revised in 2016–17.

Scope

Originating in the casework of the former city archaeological unit, this volume could have been based solely on an historically random sample of surviving pre-18th-century buildings that happened to require extensive repairs in the 1980s and early 90s. However, it was appreciated by the original team that it would have been perverse to publish this group while excluding the outstanding 12th-century Bishop’s Hall, next to the cathedral, Hereford’s most famous historic building, even though it had not itself been the subject of a detailed investigation by the Hereford unit. The ‘secular’ remit of the original draft was also extended to include a number of Hereford’s canonical houses, built for cathedral canons and grouped around the Close, and one instance of a communal hall built at a domestic scale, on a domestic plot (29 Castle Street). This was felt to be justified, not only on the pragmatic grounds that some of the earliest surviving buildings were canonical houses, but also because, despite ownership by an ecclesiastical body, the houses were mostly built for use by ‘normal’ households rather than canons or clerks living communally, and might, in consequence, be expected to display variations on the usual infrastructure of medieval domestic life.

The original ‘Secular Buildings’ draft included some treatment of surviving almshouses, and of a purely commercial building, the Sack Warehouse on Wye Street, south of the river. These have not been included in any detail in the present volume, in order to provide a sharper focus on the setting of medieval and early modern domestic life. The present book also departs from the 1996 draft in that an extra building has been added – the Mansion House on Widemarsh Street. This is the earliest brick house known to survive in Hereford; it has received little prior attention but was felt to provide an ideal end-point for the study, enabling a discussion of the final demise of timber-framing in Hereford after an unchallenged reign of almost a millennium of (arguably) urban life.

The sample of 24 buildings is small by any standard. It probably represents less than five per cent of the total number of Hereford households in the later Middle Ages – though this is based on little more than guesswork, guided by a tax-paying population in 1377 of 1903 people, implying a rather larger total population and perhaps 500–600 households. The sample represents about 20%, one-fifth, of the approximately 121 listed buildings in the city with dated, pre-1700, fabric or ‘early cores’.

All of the buildings in this volume are listed buildings, with two exceptions: 64–66 Widemarsh Street, demolished since it was surveyed; and the Essex Arms, Widemarsh Street, now moved to a country park. The total population of historic buildings in Hereford is unknown. Plate 3 represents the distribution of known buildings, period by period, but how much more early fabric lies concealed behind brick frontages and in attics is difficult to say. Many of the buildings of ostensibly of 18th- or 19th-century date are likely to conceal earlier structures.

1

Introduction

Nigel Baker

1.1 The City of Hereford (Figs 1.1, 1.2; Plate 1)

Hereford, the county town of Herefordshire, lies on the north bank of the River Wye, its walled historic core placed on a naturally defensible promontory between the Wye riverbank and the Widemarsh Brook, flowing from the north-west and joining the Wye about a mile to the east of the city centre. With a current population of 58,000, Hereford has substantially outgrown its medieval walls and the built-up area now covers around fifteen square kilometres, with vigorous new growth, particularly on the south bank. In contrast, renewal in the historic centre has been muted, as the city has struggled to find new purposes beyond its inherited role as a service-centre for the agricultural hinterland. Around the same time as the bronze statue of a Herefordshire bull took centre-stage on a plinth in High Town, the centuries-old livestock market moved from just outside the city wall, where it had been since 1854, to the distant suburb of Homer. The Buttermarket, the direct descendant of the High Town market founded in the 1070s, is now, after a long period of decline, looking to re-invent and regenerate itself in private ownership. Corn merchants’ premises are now luxury flats. Out in the historic suburbs, from which the tanneries departed a generation or more ago, the scent of pasteurising apple juice rising from the Bulmer’s cider factory on Whitecross Road is the only sign that the city still processes agricultural produce. A slight, but revealing, indicator of the economic precariousness of the city centre – and one which would have been recognised as such by the householders and city officers of centuries past – is offered by the empty frontages on the south side of High Town, only now (as this volume goes to press) on the verge of being rebuilt, eight years after a serious fire in October 2010.

Figure 1.1 Hereford: its location within the region and county

Figure 1.2 Simplified plan of the historic core showing modern street-names and building locations

But such economic hesitancy has, since the 19th century, had another, contrary, effect – the survival of historic urban fabric. Hereford has the best-preserved, most complete, medieval town-plan of virtually any county-town in England, measured in terms of new streets (only one) created within the old walls. And Hereford not only retains its Cathedral Close intact, unruptured by new roads, but the close is framed by a halo of large, ancient, open properties that derive from those of the medieval cathedral canons. These too are a rare and precious survival in a 21st-century city.

Finally, as this book relates, Hereford contains some of the oldest secular and domestic buildings in the country which pre-date the Black Death still in everyday use: the Bishop’s Great Hall of the late 12th century, the Cathedral Barn, partly of the 13th century, and 20 Church Street, of the early 14th century. These are described in detail below, along with a further 21 historic buildings of the later medieval and early modern periods. Some of these, like the Old House in High Town, are well-known, almost iconic, Hereford buildings. Others are recent discoveries, more likely to be known only to their residents or staff, and a handful of enthusiasts and professionals.

1.2 Hereford 1100–1700: a brief economic profile (Figs 1.3, 1.4)

The economic history of medieval and early modern Hereford has only very recently been written (Whitehead 2016; Whitehead and Hurley 2016). What follows here are the briefest notes towards what seem to be some of the more obvious and general economic and social trends, or clues to what these might, be from fragmentary and disparate sources. It is unlikely that the historical or archaeological materials will ever be available to write a detailed economic history of the earlier, pre-Black Death, centuries. Sources are sketchy for the later part of the period too, but the dendrochronologically dated buildings in this book will make their own small contribution to the evolving picture.

Figure 1.3 John Speed’s 1606 manuscript plan of Hereford made in preparation for his county map and atlas of 1610 (Merton College Library D.3.30, no.7)

Figure 1.4 Isaac Taylor’s map of Hereford, 1757

The period opens with the Domesday account of the city, as it was in 1086 and as it had been in 1066, with signs of both long-term growth and shorter-term contraction. The former is evident from the statement that there were households outside the defences; the latter from the account of the reduction of the bishop’s rent roll, down from 98 dwellings to 60 and a much reduced income. However, the total render due annually from Hereford to the crown had risen, from £18 before the Conquest, up to £60 – for comparison, Shrewsbury rendered £40. The number of moneyers at work (seven) minting coinage in the post-Conquest city also suggests a buoyant level of economic activity, inviting comparisons with towns similarly provided – Canterbury and Oxford – and contrasting with Shrewsbury’s three moneyers. Other potential stimuli of economic growth can be identified: the creation of the new market place (later High Town) on the bishop’s land outside the defences and the introduction of French burgesses. The Domesday reference to six smiths working in Hereford shows that iron goods were being manufactured, but gives no clue to the scale and ubiquity of iron-working right across the city that has been revealed by many years of archaeological excavation. The total population of the city at this time is extremely difficult to estimate, but a minimum post-Conquest figure of 1100 can be suggested, based on the number of recorded households (226 or more, including 103 of the king, 27 of Earl Harold, 60 of the bishop, and 20 of Roger de Lacy) and a likely multiplier of five persons per household (DB f.179a–181v; Lobel 1969, 2–4).

Despite the chaos of the civil war of the 1130s, the 12th century appears to have been dominated by economic growth. By the end of the century Hereford’s suburbs had achieved more or less their maximum extent, not exceeded until the 19th century, with new religious houses founded at their outer limits. The now more-abundant documentary evidence shows a growing number of trades, with a flourishing cloth industry and a wealthy Jewish community located in the area north of High Town enclosed by new defences in the middle of the century (Shoesmith and Pikes 2016, 38). While not remotely measureable, the impact of building work at the cathedral on the urban economy is likely to have been substantial, with complete rebuilding of the cathedral church taking place between c.1107 and 1148 and substantial work at its east end in 1186–98 (Morris, in Aylmer and Tiller 2000). It is highly likely too that building work was taking place on all of the parish churches in the course of the 12th century, though evidence of this has been obscured by later rebuilding (at All Saints and St Peter’s) or by the later demolition of the churches (St Nicholas’, St Owen’s, St Martin’s).

The 13th century too should have been a century of almost uninterrupted economic growth, though it is not always easy to distinguish between new and newly documented structures, organisations, trades and processes. So, within the High Town market-place were the stalls or shops of the butchers (bocheria), fishmongers (piscaria), drapers (draperia), and cooks (rangia cocorum). Fines paid for encroachments onto the highway may relate to the creation of the market-infilling rows, such as Butchers’ Row, at this time. Other trades are represented for the first time by recorded street-names, such as Corvesors’ Row and Sadelwrites’ Street, though they may have been present, unrecorded, for many years (Lobel 1969, 6).

Closely packed buildings were probably a feature of central Hereford by c.1154 at the latest. The Customs of Hereford record that the common bell might be rung to summon householders in the event of, for example, ‘a terrible fire burning any row of houses within the city’ (Johnson 1882, 17–18). This source is problematic, in that it survives only in third-hand copies of a document compiled, ostensibly, from earlier sources in 1486, but it would scarcely be surprising for the period. In Shrewsbury, even in the 1080s heavy fines were levied on any burgess whose house burnt down; nevertheless, serious (parish-wide) town fires were recorded there in 1276, 1312 and 1393 (DB f.252; VCH Shropshire VI, part 1, 77, 106).

The building trades in Hereford are likely to have expanded substantially in the course of the century: while only one known fragment of a secular domestic building survives (the Cathedral Barn, see below) there is abundant evidence of massive institutional investment. New city defences of earthwork and timber were built in the 1140s or early 50s, and early in the following century they were rebuilt in stone (Shoesmith and Pikes 2016, 38; Shoesmith and Morriss 2002). Between 1230 and 1250 the castle was completely reconstructed and a new ‘great tower’ was built on the motte between 1245 and 1251 (Whitehead in Shoesmith 1980, 5). The cathedral underwent substantial rebuilding at its east end in the 1220s–30s, the north transept was remodelled between c.1245 and 1268, and towards the end of the century vaulting and windows in the nave and choir were replaced. Following the death of Bishop Thomas Cantilupe in 1282 and the translation of his bones into a new shrine, a thriving cult developed, bringing pilgrims and new income to the cathedral and the city (Morris, in Aylmer and Tiller 2000). Other ecclesiastical institutions – hospitals and two friaries – came to the city, mostly founded on extramural properties, and the parish churches of St Peter’s and All Saints both underwent almost complete rebuilding around the end of the century.

In accounting for the growth of the city at this time, Margaret Lobel cited three particular factors: trade with a pacified Wales; the city’s status as a free borough, acquired by successive charters that allowed it a degree of self-government and a guild merchant; and the presence of the cathedral and the royal castle (Lobel 1969, 7). While each of these factors would, without doubt, have been significant, it is impossible to determine their relative importance or offer any kind of quantification.

The city’s prosperity was evidently maintained into the 14th century, despite the obsolescence of the castle following the Edwardian conquest of Wales and its subsequent decline as a regular royal residence. At the cathedral, the cult of St Thomas Cantilupe flourished, to the benefit of the local victualling trades catering for pilgrims, and was accompanied by further significant building work, notably the addition of the tower over the crossing in 1307 (Morris, in Aylmer and Tiller 2000). Whether Hereford, as a market for agricultural produce, suffered as a consequence of the successive bad harvests and livestock diseases prevalent in the second and third decades of the 14th century, we do not know, but, from early in the century, ‘subsistence migrants from the highlands of Wales’, rather than merchants, became the most frequent travellers using the Wye Bridge (Whitehead 2016, 106).

It is, however, quite clear that the impact on the city of the Black Death in 1348–49 and a further epidemic in 1361, would have been severe. As ever, it is only ecclesiastical records that reveal any details, and these show the canons of St Peter’s taking services to replace clergy that had died or resigned. In 1349, 120 deaths were recorded in St Peter’s parish out of a population there of about 700 (Whitehead 2016, 106). Mortality statistics from elsewhere suggest that between 30 and 50 per cent of the population is likely to have been lost and a figure of 43 per cent has been suggested for Hereford (ibid). The effect on the city in the medium and long term is simply not known, though the experience of Gloucester may be instructive. There, the population level gradually grew again, though never, in the medieval period, back to what it had been before the Black Death. After the immediate calamity had passed, the city appears to have maintained its prosperity, with evidence of widespread rebuilding of private houses in the central streets and at the major ecclesiastical institutions, though there was simultaneously an abandonment of poorer tenements in the suburbs, some of which became depopulated and contracted to the point of disappearance (Holt 1990).

No comparable historical evidence is available yet for Hereford, though the rental of St Guthlac’s Priory for the years 1436–1559 shows an institution struggling to survive and to recoup full economic rents from its properties. Rents stayed flat despite inflation, or ‘decayed’, and some disappeared as references to ‘garden ground’ and ‘void ground’ proliferated (Whitehead 2016, 114). Hints of a contraction in economic activity and perhaps settlement are also beginning to emerge from the archaeological record. Deposits dateable from the pottery they contained to the ‘early 15th century or later’ were, in 2002, rare in comparison with deposits dateable to ‘the later 14th and early 15th century’, and certainly extremely rare in comparison to deposits of ‘the late 13th to mid-14th centuries’. This may have been due, in part, to the machining-off of later deposits in the first generation of open-area excavations in the early 1970s, but was nevertheless felt to represent a genuine drop in activity levels between c.1300 and c.1400 (Vince, in Thomas and Boucher 2002, 70). A more recent study of an excavation between Gaol Street and Bath Street noted that ‘it is clear that there was a hiatus in occupation in many parts of Hereford in the middle to later 14th century, as a result of the fall in population resulting from climatic deterioration and the Black Death’ (Crooks 2009, appendix 2).

Later 14th-century Hereford was dominated by the cloth trades – the sale and export of raw wool together with its processing locally by fullers, weavers and dyers, and manufacture into finished products by tailors, hosiers and cappers. These seem to have flourished, to the extent that the city could afford the £100 loan to the crown necessary for it to acquire a new charter in 1399 (Lobel 1969, 9). Building work at the cathedral may have been retarded by the mid-century epidemics but was later pursued vigorously. A new chapter house, started c.1340, was completed c.1370; the rebuilding of the cloister, planned in the 14th century, was finally under way in 1412, and the north porch, started c.1500, was finished by 1518 (Morris, in Aylmer and Tiller 2000).

Taxation records (the Lay Subsidy returns) for Hereford before and after the Black Death show the town’s national ranking slipping slightly from 13th place in 1334 (local comparisons are Shrewsbury at 7th place and Gloucester at 16th) to 19th place in 1377 (when Shrewsbury was 17th, Worcester 25th), at which time it had a tax-paying population of 1903 (Hoskins 1972, appendix 1). It remained at 19th place in 1523–27 – at which time Shrewsbury had slipped to 26th place, with Gloucester little changed at 17th. Evidence cited below (p. 136) for tenements lying ‘unbuilded’ on Widemarsh Street outside the gate at the end of the 16th century may point to the partial depopulation of that suburb.

When John Leland visited in 1538 Hereford was well kept, its defences in good repair, though the castle had been let go. However, that year the Reformation came to Hereford as the dissolution of its monastic houses began, their lands snapped-up by the leading townsmen. Economic misfortune followed, the clothing industry going into a decline that was attributed at the time to Henry VIII’s closure of two fulling mills and two corn mills – though similar developments were to be seen in many other English towns. The industry was still in deep trouble in 1585, when Bishop Scorie left stock to two clothiers to enable them to put the poor to work. At the same time the weavers complained of their distressed condition by reason of the admission of strangers and unapprenticed youths – a protectionist attitude no doubt fostered by outside competition as cloth production shifted to the smaller towns and countryside. Nevertheless, Hereford’s markets remained busy and the opening years of the 17th century saw the construction of a new three-storey timber-framed market hall in High Town, and several of the buildings covered in this volume.

The sieges and uncertainties suffered by Hereford in the course of the English Civil War appear to have left its economy seriously compromised. Its national ranking can again be judged from taxation records, and it is striking that Hereford does not appear amongst the top 42 provincial towns listed in the 1662 Hearth Tax returns. The probability is that the largest, wealthiest houses recorded for the Hearth Tax three years later with between five and eleven hearths each, rather than the usual one or two, were the old timber-framed mansions built well before the Civil War (Lobel 1969, 10). The 1665 Hearth Tax records 364 households, which has been used to calculate a population total within the walls of 1456, not including servants, lodgers and the poor (Whitehead and Hurley 2016, 192). In 1757, Isaac Taylor recorded population totals of 3878 within the walls and a further 1714 in the suburbs (5592 total); by the time of the 1801 census the total population had risen – but not much – to 6828 (ibid).

Despite the population growth evident between the mid-17th and mid-18th century, Hereford remained a remote county town, blighted, according to contemporaries, by poor transport links and the lack of a single substantial industry; the corollary of this was that it remained, until a relatively late date, a largely timber-framed town, still enclosed by its medieval walls.

1.3 The historic townscape of central Hereford (Plates 1–4)

Measured in terms of changes made to the street pattern since the early middle ages, Hereford has, for a city of its size, one of the best-preserved medieval town-plans anywhere in the country. Cantilupe Street, which cuts across formerly open ground at the angle made by St Owen Street and the eastern defences, was built at the end of the nineteenth century; every other street came into existence at a date before the earliest surviving records begin, and Speed’s map of 1610 remains a perfectly serviceable guide to the modern city centre. Change certainly took place above and beyond the usual plot-by-plot rebuilding. The late 18th century saw the modernisation of the city, most importantly the removal of all the medieval city gates. But whereas in neighbouring towns, such as Worcester and Shrewsbury, street commissions set about the widening of streets, the rounding-off of corners and the straightening of irregular frontages, in Hereford this process was relatively cautious, the only drastic street-widening being at the north end of Broad Street, the old Saxon Norgate.

The town plan is dominated by the horseshoe-like arc of the medieval defences. The top of the arc is a mid-12th-century extension of the Saxon defences to enclose the early Norman market place of High Town. This was based on a triangular junction of major through-routes, with roads heading west towards Wales and the upper Wye Valley, north-east towards Worcester, and south-east towards Gloucester and ultimately London. The streets forming the base of the High Town triangle are, from west to east, Eign Gate (formerly Eign Street), High Street, High Town, St Peter’s Street and St Owen Street; all of them follow the outer edge of the pre-Conquest town ditch which in turn mirrors the bend in the River Wye 300 metres further south. West Street and East Street, running parallel to the Eign Gate/St Owen Street line, follow the back of the Saxon rampart, as one of their former names, ‘Behind-the-Walls Lane’ implies.

South of (within) the Saxon defences, the street plan is quite distinctive, characterised by a series of approximately parallel north–south lanes interrupted by the streets of the only main north–south through-route – Broad Street/King Street/Bridge Street – and, centrally placed on the river bank, the Cathedral Close. The pattern of parallel lanes and streets has, since the 1970s, been interpreted as a surviving pre-Conquest street grid, based not just on their general morphology but on excavated evidence for the mid-Saxon date of two lanes on the western edge of the city: Berrington Street, and another, short-lived, previously unknown lane (Shoesmith 1982). While there is now little doubt that much of the street plan is indeed of pre-Conquest date, it seems less likely than was once thought that this was a consequence of a single act of town planning by one of the Saxon kings. This is suggested first by the slightly different arrangements of streets and plots found either side of Broad Street (described further below) and, second, by the division of pre-Conquest Hereford between two different principal jurisdictions or fees – the Bishop’s and the King’s. In the later medieval period these fees had ceased to be coherent blocks of territory and had become ‘estates’ in the sense of collections of properties (Rosser 1998), but much earlier they are likely to have had discrete areas. The cathedral parish of St John may well represent the parochial ‘ghost’ of the bishop’s territory, the parishes either side, the king’s. In particular, the parish boundary between St John’s and St Nicholas’ to the west followed a substantial natural topographical feature, a small, steep-sided stream valley running south into the Wye, now largely infilled but recorded as ‘the King’s Ditch’. The manorial partitioning of the early town makes it less likely that Hereford was ‘planned’ with an overall street grid at one moment in time, more likely that it was developed by different agencies in a number of separate episodes.

Hereford thus exhibits in its plan, just as clearly as, for example, Nottingham, the extension after the Norman Conquest of a pre-existing Saxon fortified town or burh. Not only is the outline of the pre-Conquest town still perfectly evident in the town plan, but the difference between Saxon Hereford and Norman Hereford also persists to this day in the city economy. Broadly speaking, a distinction can be drawn between ‘the cathedral city’ and the ‘commercial city’: that is to say, between those parts of Hereford, mainly residential but with professional practices too, dominated by the Cathedral Close and related institutions (particularly the Cathedral School); and, on the other hand, those parts of Hereford dominated by the much busier retailing streets. This distinction, which can be quantified and mapped (Plate 2), broadly reflects the difference between Saxon Hereford and Norman Hereford.

The map reveals a concentration of modern retail and commercial functions radiating out from the High Town triangle but only achieving significant penetration south, through the former defences and into the Anglo-Saxon town, in two places: down the Broad Street/King Street/Bridge Street through-route, and down Church Street. This too is part of Hereford’s historic character: Broad Street appears to have been the market place of the pre-Conquest town, and there have been shops on Church Street from at least the early 14th century. But it is also the case that, away from the concentration of retailing around High Town, no two streets have exactly the same mix of functions.

Since these differentials in the pattern of land-use are of such long standing, they have influenced the form of the city centre buildings and the continuing process of their renewal. It is thus no surprise to see from a map of city-centre buildings distinguished by period (Plate 3) that the greatest concentration of buildings of 20th-century and later date correlates closely with retail and commercial functions, based on High Town. Away from this concentration, and particularly within the Anglo-Saxon defences, the built-up area of the historic centre is mainly, at least to the eye, of 18th- and 19th-century date (Plate 3 is based largely on externally visible or recorded fabric). But again, on close examination, no two streets exhibit exactly the same mix of historical periods – and in this respect at least there is a greater degree of diversity in the High Town core, since while